After (Part 2)
Present Perfect Continuity
You can find part 1 here.
5. Disassemble Engine
Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.
LhuzieRules-light games, by definition, do not tend to have engines. The game master’s role is supposed to throw improv storytelling, off-the-cuff performance, and impromptu game design to make a game “work” and reproduce itself. Still, After is a well-structured game, being able to produce After through its mechanics; if not an engine, it has something quite engine-like. Each session in a campaign establishes what is expected from a session, with a limited number of Memories and Flashbacks establishing how many scenes will play in the Past and how many will play in the future/present.
Challenges and trying to meet them drive narrative between scenes — and sometimes between sessions or even through a campaign. However, their use is too arbitrary to be reliably counted as an engine. This is where the unusually named Focus takes over as what powers the game.
Focus is the true narrative currency of After. Memories are nice and all, but you have one per session and can, realistically, get another one during a session; they don’t really change how you play After, but are a nice treat that you are wasting if you are not using — a real waste, considering how powerful their effect is. But Focus? Each character can get up to 5 Focus, with the amount of Focus they have earned during the campaign communicating at which stage of their personal narrative they are. This is no idle indicator, but an active algedonic signal: it connects everything.
Focus (and Empty Focus) are used to fuel powers, being deeply interwoven with your character archetype. Focus is the dubious reward of Experience: failure and costly successes will increase your Experience in attributes; the better you are at an attribute, the more Experience you need to learn before being subject to a Focus. Focus accumulates; it changes how you relate to your powers, change how you play your character, chugs the game in a given direction. Because Experience gets you Focus, you both want to avoid rolling with your bad attributes if possible… but you also have to roll with different attributes because your primary ones have already accumulated too much Experience. Focus represents the weight of the events, the consequences, and lasting changes inflicted by your choices and actions; the amount of Focus you have accumulated determines your epilogue; max your Focus and you are at the mercy of a fate decided for you.
BradFocus is where the rubber meets the road, the place that says where you are at the narrative of After. You gain Focus as you spend experience, which drives you ever further towards the end of your arc, inexorable and sudden. As you become more powerful, your stats become impossible to roll, so burdened with all of your experiences, you are pushed to the end.
Memories are powerful, but we have already established that After is about who you are with power, not who you were before, so it is only fitting that they are motor oil to Focus’s gas.
6. Essentials For Session One
So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.
LhuzieWell, After already has your season zero well planned. So what should you use your hour of prep for? Some suggestions.
Familiarize yourself with the structure of the game, specially with what you do in Session 0 of After (pg 3).
Learn how Checks (pg. 6) and Challenges (pg. 7)
You need to become good at making challengers sooner rather than later. Cross-reference the Challenge Template (pg. 9) with the talk about Challenges to the Narrator (pg. 58-61).
Due to the quite unique definition of terms used, maybe familiarize yourself with the Glossary (pg. 72) for later consultation.
You can post-pone making decisions for character creation until the second session, but you should check how characters work if you have the time, at least the steps of character creation (pg. 12) and how risk rolls and focus interact with character options (pg. 13-14)
BradRead the game, high-five your players for agreeing to play a game that is actually low prep!
7. Playing The Game Wrong
Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?
LhuzieThe nomenclature of the game has to be one of the biggest stress points. Experience and Focus will always feel inappropriate for the concepts they are meant to describe to an experienced ear; reminding yourself and others of what they actually mean in After whenever assumptions take over is a good way to prevent issues from false familiarity.
Challenges are presented relatively tone neutral, as an “advanced” conflict resolution system. However, as mentioned previously, they are extremely central to the game. Powers and the mechanics of After only really work when Challenges are centered as the mechanical pivot point for the entire game. This is obvious to anyone spending some time with the game, but if you take a brief glance, jump in, and want to learn on the go, it is easy to misunderstand how central they are to After. So, any dice rolling that happens should, by “default,” be tied to an ongoing challenge — making challenges the norm and orphaned dice rolls the exception.
The Consequences on After are some of the most fun takes on the concept I have seen in this artform, but rely a lot on gut feelings and arbitration and are not always intuitive. They take a bit of system mastery on the part of the game master to really live up to their fun and narrative potential. It is well worth it.
BradHey, use challenges and for the love of sweet lady statistics, use a light hand of statistics and be careful that you don’t veer too heavily into “Mother May I?”.
8. What to Steal
Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.
Lhuzie Listening to many of the frustrations people have with Triangle Agency, After is exactly the type of game people seem to want and expect from Triangle Agency rather than meeting the game where it is at. Triangle Agency is still there if you want the best horror roleplaying game of the last decade and the depersonalized horror of corporate slaves capturing others like them while everything is drowned in HR Cozy and Corpokitsch; but if you want something more rule- light, improv-heavy, with mechanics that lend themselves to some wacky randomness, well, After does that. No need to be frustrated trying to make a game do what it is not about, denying yourself both what you want and the opportunity to subject yourself to transformative art.
Compared to yet another games, there are many echoes of Nobilis and Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine in After. In many ways, After paints a picture of what a “rules-light” take on the oeuvre of Jenna K. Moran would look like. Those games are carefully designed and very heavy in rules and systems — just not in the way many recognize those —so it is a remarkable case study to see what we lose and what we gain with the different approaches and what must fill the space left by a “rules-light” approach.
Finally, if you are looking for different ways to tell stories, especially ways that may not work in other media but work amazingly in this artform? Play After.
BradI’ll always bang the drum of commitment, but After is proof. Think about the artform we are in, and build your art to use the medium to help you. That’s honestly what separates the great painters and sculptors from the average, the people who use their medium to its maximum potential understand how it actually works and what its limitations are. After only works in ttrpgs, so give it a shot and see how the medium can help work with, and define art.
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